BOOKS.
ARTHUR YOUNG'S "TRAVELS IN FRA_NCE."* NOTHING could be more opportune than the new edition of Arthur Young's Travels in France which Miss Betham Edwards has just published, preceded by a sympathetic memoir of the author, and furnished with a comparative view of the agricultural condition of the country in 1789 and 1889. It is just a hundred years since the Suffolk squire was traversing the length and breadth of France, accumulating that store of accurate observations and weighty judgments by which every writer on the ancien regime, from De Tocque- vine to Taine, has been so largely influenced. Young's French tour, like his earlier tours in England and Ireland, was undertaken primarily in the cause of agriculture; but he was no mere agricultural specialist, and had an eye for other things besides turnips. He saw France just as it was before the outbreak of the Revolution, and he described it daily in his diary with a judgment unclouded and unbiassed by any knowledge of the events that were to follow. As a photo- graphic picture of the old order, with all its abuses, his work must always remain unrivalled. Agriculture was his absorbing interest, and he did more for its advance- ment than perhaps any Englishman has ever done ; yet his remarks on the agricultural systems of France are far from being the soundest in the book. The apostle of large farms had little appreciation of the latent capabilities of the metayage, or half-profit system, when relieved of the burden of feudal exactions ; and not much more of the peasant-proprietor- ship and petite culture which have turned large areas of what was waste in his time into a garden. The moral and political disorders, under which France has laboured during the last hundred years, have often exclusively occupied the attention of observers, and even coloured their pictures of its material condition ; but it must be admitted that in that period, no country has profited more by the patient industry and thrift of its rural population. Following Young's example, Miss Betham Edwards has visited the various districts of France during the past few years, and though her observations have none of the authority of Young's, the facts she records are eloquent of themselves. Brittany, for instance, which Young described as consisting of " landes, landes, landes " (wastes, wastes, wastes), and as "a country possessing nothing but privilege and poverty," has now won for itself the title of "the granary of France," and might fairly be styled "the market-garden of England" as well. In place of the barren country, and the cave-dwellings or Troglodyte villages of Maine and Anjou, that saddened Young's eyes, we find a rich country and a prosperous popu- lation, the poorest of whom, Miss Edwards declares, eat asparagus, green-peas, and strawberries every day in season. Nowhere has 'Young's famous aphorism about the magic of property that turns sand to gold received a fuller exemplifi- cation than in France since the Revolution.
As for Young himself, as seen in his diary and in Miss Edwards's memoir, he is at least 'as interesting as anything in his book, and few men have a better title to be included in the list of our English worthies. He was one of the greatest agricultural theorists and worst practical farmers that ever lived. He began life by coming to grief over two farms that he had taken from his mother, and then set out in 1768 on his famous tours through England in search of land that would pay. He was never destined to find any himself; nor is this surprising, seeing that he indulged in no less than three thousand experiments on one farm alone. But his
• Travels in France by Arthur Young during the Years 1787-88-89. With In- troduction, Biographical Sketch, and Notes by IL Betham Edwards. London : George Bell and Sons. observations and comparisons and experiments bore fruit for others, though not for himself; and he set on foot a movement in advance which has had the effect of doubling the yield of agricultural land. To the end, his taste for practical farming never deserted him, and in an expansive moment, he writes in the diary of his French tour :—" I should like to have a score of farms myself from the Vale of Valencia to the Highlands, and to visit and direct their cultivation by turns."
Young made three tours in France, in the years 1787, 1788, and 1789; and Miss Edwards has confined herself to re- publishing the diaries of these tours and the chapter on the. Revolution, omitting a large quantity of statistical and purely agricultural matter which appeared in the original work. In its present form it makes as good a book of travels as it would be easy to name. The men and manners and social usages of the country, and the state of feeling in Paris and the pro- vinces at the outbreak of the Revolution, are all described with no less care and intelligence than are devoted to purely agricultural matters. In Young, besides the agri- culturist, there was much of the philosopher and the statesman. One thing that struck him very much was the way in which town life predominated over country life in pre-Revolutionary France. He is for ever contrasting the splendour of towns like Bordeaux and Nantes, with theatres twice as large and many times as magnificent as the Drury Lane of those days, with the deserted and poverty-stricken air of the surrounding country. Occasionally we find a comparison between French and English habits which holds good no longer. The French he pronounces cleaner in their persons, the English in their houses. The English had finer linen, but the French more of it and changed oftener. No French bed- room was without some sort of bath, a trait of persona/ cleanliness he could wish more common in England. The Anglo-Indian had not yet taught us to wash.
Young moved in the best society in France, and though he could not get the great nobles to talk about agriculture, they entertained him hospitably. He was present at Versailles at the meeting of the States-General, and witnessed the dispute as to the separation of the three orders. From this scene of political confusion he tore himself away without an effort, amit set out in what he calls a light cabriolet, or gig anglois, to complete his survey of France. He was already at Metz on the day the Bastille fell. Nothing is more striking in his book than his description of the ignorance and backward condition of the provinces; not a newspaper to be seen even in considerable towns, and the people ready to accept any rumour, however - wild or fantastic. For himself, he was often taken for an emissary of Marie Antoinette, seeking to undo the work of the Revolution. He was back in Paris in the opening days of the new year, when the fever of plots was at its height; and we find him dining at the Tuileries with the Due de Liancourt, and going on to the Jacobin Club, of which he was forth- with admitted a member. This was the day before he left for England.
Young's Travels were first published in 1792, just eighteen months after his friend Burke had given his Reflections to the world; his views on the Revolution are contained in a final chapter, which Mr. Morley has described as "a luminous criticism of the most important side of the Revolution, worth a hundred times more than all Burke and Paine and Macintosh put together." This, of course, is exaggerated praise. Young could not,like Burke, see with prophetic vision the evils which the Revolution was to bring forth, but he knew. infinitely better than Burke did the evils it had swept away. "Wherever you stumble on a grand seigneur, even one that is worth millions, you find his property desert," is a sentence that carries with it the condemnation of a whole class. The oppression of the intendants ; the " scourges " of the Capitaineries, those "tortures of the peasantry ;" the feudal exactions, the folly and iniquity of the Parlements,—are all exposed in this weighty indictment, which is one of the first things to be read by any one who would understand the Revolution aright. With revolutionary excess Young had no more sympathy than Burke himself, and subsequent events made him think that the evils he exposed were swept away at too great a cost.
After his return from France, Young had still thirty years of life before him, to be spent chiefly in the congenial post of Secretary to the Board of Agriculture, and in the society of the best men of the time. Ten years before his death, Wilber- force involuntarily caused his blindness, by moving him to tears for the loss of a common friend after he had undergone an operation for cataract. At Bradfield, Miss Edwards tells us there are still one or two old people living who remember the blind old squire, but not as an agriculturist, or a writer, or a philosopher, but as a great preacher and an unrivalled ex- pounder of the Gospel,—this being the favourite pursuit of his closing years.
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